Preparing for the Next Haiti, with Maps, Texts and Tweets

In the weeks following the January 12 earthquake, the relief effort in Haiti relied in part on crowdsourcing: an army of volunteers in the United States and elsewhere helped sift through emergency text messages, translated them and send them on to first responders on the scene. According to Rob Munro, a graduate fellow at Stanford who works with the nonprofit Energy for Opportunity, about 40,000 useful text messages came through the system in the first six weeks, meaning that thousands of Haitians received timely requests for food, water or medical help.

At the height of the crisis, texts were arriving every few seconds. Volunteers were able to receive a message, translate it and and send a grid location to teams on the ground within a matter of minutes. But the high-tech Haiti volunteer response also depended in large part on personal connections, and the mobilization of the Haitian diaspora in North America, for it to work. Now development agencies, relief workers and even the U.S. government are looking at ways to reproduce the experiment in the next emergency.

In a tech meetup yesterday at the State Department, several of the key players who helped set up SMS situation rooms for earthquake response pointed out that tapping social networks and information technology was easier said than done. Josh Nesbit of Frontline SMS Medic said that personal connections — and the intervention of members of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s staff — were key in persuading the military and the Coast Guard to respond to the directions sent by volunteers.

“This was an ecosystem that sort of evolved and emerged out of thin air — and it was based almost entirely on personal relationships and trust,” said Luke Beckman of the nonprofit group InSTEDD. “It was who-knows-who, who-can-find-who — and who can you you text, who can you Skype, who can you tweet.”

The response, Beckman added, relied in large part on volunteers from the Haitian diaspora who could provide quick and timely translations of messages from French or Creole. “And if it happens somewhere else,” he asked, “do we have that kind of diaspora in the United States, or in whatever country is trying to mobilize this response?”

Veterans of the Haiti relief effort are also trying to figure out what worked and what didn’t when it came to dispatching search-and-rescue teams. According to Beckman, some first responders were sent to the wrong locations; in other cases, teams that could have been on the scene quickly were sent to more distant locations.

“There are things that we can do better,” Beckman said. “And I think it’s our responsibility, if we’re going to do this kind of thing, to get that kind of information.”